Protect your Reputation with Email Pausing and Configuration Set Reputation Metrics

In August, we launched the reputation dashboard, which helps you track important metrics that could impact your ability to send emails. By monitoring the metrics in this dashboard, you can protect your sender reputation, which can increase the likelihood that the emails you send will reach your customers’ inboxes.

Today, we’re launching two features that build upon the capabilities of the reputation dashboard. The first is the ability to temporarily pause email sending, either at the configuration set level, or across your entire Amazon SES account. The second is the ability to export reputation metrics for individual configuration sets.

Email Pausing

Today’s update includes new API operations that can temporarily pause your ability to send email using Amazon SES. To disable email sending across your entire Amazon SES account, you can use the UpdateAccountSendingEnabled operation. To pause sending only for emails sent using a specific configuration set, you can use the UpdateConfigurationSetSendingEnabled operation.

Email pausing is helpful because Amazon SES uses automatic enforcement policies. If the bounce or complaint rates for your account are too high, your account is automatically placed on probation. If the bounce or complaint issues continue after the probation period has ended, your account may be suspended.

With email pausing, you can temporarily halt your ability to send email before your account is placed on probation. While your ability to send email is paused, you can identify the issues that were causing your account to register high bounce or complaint rates. You can then resume sending after the issues are resolved.

Email pausing helps ensure that your ability to send email using Amazon SES is not interrupted because of enforcement issues. It helps ensure that your sender reputation won’t be damaged by mistakes or unforeseen issues.

You can learn more about the UpdateAccountSendingEnabled and UpdateConfigurationSetSendingEnabled operations in the Amazon Simple Email Service API Reference.

Configuration Set Reputation Metrics

Amazon SES automatically publishes the bounce and complaint rates for your account to Amazon CloudWatch. In CloudWatch, you can monitor these metrics over time, and create alarms that notify you when your reputation metrics cross certain thresholds.

With today’s update, you can also publish reputation metrics for individual configuration sets to CloudWatch. This feature gives you additional information about the messages you send using Amazon SES. For example, if you send all of your marketing emails using one configuration set, and your transactional emails using a different configuration set, you can view distinct reputation metrics for each type of email.

Because we anticipate that this feature will lead to the creation of many new configuration sets, we’re increasing the maximum number of configuration sets you can create from 50 to 10,000.

For more information about exporting reputation metrics for configuration sets, see Exporting Reputation Metrics for a Configuration Set to CloudWatch in the Amazon Simple Email Service Developer Guide.

Automating These Features

You can use AWS services—including Amazon SNS, AWS Lambda, and Amazon CloudWatch—to create a solution that automatically pauses email sending for your account when your overall reputation metrics cross a certain threshold. Or, to minimize disruption to your email sending program, you can pause email sending for a specific configuration set when the metrics for that configuration set cross a threshold. The following image illustrates the processes that occur when you implement these solutions.

For more information on both of these solutions, see Automatically Pausing Email Sending in the Amazon Simple Email Service Developer Guide.

We’re always looking for ways to help safeguard the reputation you’ve worked hard to build. If you have suggestions, questions, or comments, we’d love to hear from you in the comments below, or in the Amazon SES Forum.

These features are now available in the following AWS Regions: US West (Oregon), US East (N. Virginia), and EU (Ireland).